Whose Amazing Grace

I was driving the car last week and listening to a program on CBC Radio 1 – The Next Chapter.  It was an interview with Christina Sharpe the author of Ordinary Notes.  As the on-line material for the program states, the book “explores the everyday complexities of Canadian Black life in her work as a professor and shares those experiences in her new form-defying book.” 

Sharpe provides an interesting and evocative perspective on the ‘black experience’.  One statement that particularly caught my attention was her critique of the song Amazing Grace.  Here is part of Clarke’s critique of this iconic song of redemption discussing Barack Obama singing the song during the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a mass shooting at a Charleston church:

And then, of course, when he sings it’s the opposite of Glover’s tapping. He had to sing “Amazing Grace” because “Amazing Grace” is precisely that unhearable Black suffering. It’s precisely that song of romance and redemption because we know John Newton’s history. We know that he keeps working on the slave ships after his conversion and it’s only later that he writes “Amazing Grace.”

To sing “Amazing Grace” is to mispronounce the song. And it’s always trying to articulate. It is to insist on a romance of salvation in which the grace is for Newton. The grace is not for us. It is to misunderstand the genesis and the subject of the song and the violence that the song never begins to deal with. The song has long elided its origins and attached itself to the fascia of Black spirituality. When we sing this, who is the wretch? Who was lost? Who was found? Who is in need of redemption? It is about Newton’s journey; it has nothing to do with the horrors and terrors of slavery for the enslaved.

Amazing Grace has become the iconic theme for freedom and redemption.  Sharpe’s critique of the song made me figuratively, if not literally, sit up and take note (remember I was driving in my car, so I was already sitting up).  As Sharpe states, the song expressed the redemption of the composer, John Newton who was a slave trader and recognized the wrong he had committed and was redeemed.  It was not about the redemption of black people who had been enslaved.  Sharpe states, the song has “attached itself to the fascia of Black spirituality.”  It has become an iconic ‘spiritual’ anthem in black culture. 

The question that I have when considering this is, can this song be an anthem for black people given that is all about the redemption of the composer who did go on to fight to abolish the slave trade?  That cannot be answered by me, an old white guy.   But it is legitimately for me to ask, is it appropriate for people to use a song which expresses the universal truth of the experience of redemption and forgiveness, if it is written by someone who is expressing experience which is not one you share?  I can think of the Israelites being freed from slavery in Egypt.  I am not Jewish and was never enslaved in Egypt.  Can that story of a people being freed from slavery not be true for me and represent the breaking of metaphorical chains which enslave each of us?  One definition of sin which resonates with me is, the things which chain us to the past.  That is a common experience which people can relate to, and it is, in part, why the story of Moses leading the Israelites to freedom has resonated through the millennia. 

So, was Obama wrong to sing Amazing Grace at the funeral of a black pastor who was murdered in a mass killing?   Can the song legitimately represent the fight against the continuing legacy of slavery in the United States?  It certainly resonated with people and the song, it seems, is the anthem of freedom for black, at least in the United States.  Sharpe gives a thoughtful critique of that event and, by implication, how the song is used more generally.  It is worth deeper reflection on the questions that it poses.

May we be blessed on our journey to have those chains which enslave us broken.